MailChimp Email Marketing Blog » html email coding http://blog.mailchimp.com MailChimp, email marketing, and monkeys! Wed, 08 Feb 2012 23:04:08 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Coding HTML emails for Facebookhttp://blog.mailchimp.com/coding-html-emails-for-facebook/ http://blog.mailchimp.com/coding-html-emails-for-facebook/#comments Mon, 19 Jul 2010 20:55:38 +0000 Amanda http://blog.mailchimp.com/?p=8445 Here’s a neat advanced trick you can use to customize the way your email shows up on Facebook. It’ll assign the image of your choosing as Facebook’s thumbnail whenever it’s shared. Once you’ve added images to your campaign as you normally would (through the WYSIWYG editor), double click on the image you’d like Facebook to show as your thumbnail. When the Image Properties dialog box appears, click on the Advanced tab and enter “campaign-icon” (without quotes) in the Id field:

image_properties_dialogue

Then just click OK and you’re all set. The image that you gave the “campaign-icon” ID will become your campaign’s thumbnail on Facebook.

If you’re coding your HTML for Facebook from scratch:

Facebook looks for meta tags with specific properties in order to set the description for your page.  There are three properties that can be set:

  • <meta property=”og:image” content=”url to image”/>
  • <meta property=”og:title” content=”title of the page”/>
  • <meta property=”og:site_name” content=”name of the site”/>

These three tags allow you to tell Facebook, very specifically, how things should appear when shared: “Seamus likes [title] on [site_name]” next to the [image] icon. And in case you’re curious, “og” stands for “opengraph” which is what Facebook calls their API.

advanced_facebook_HTML

So when you’re coding your own HTML, you’ll want to use the following syntax (and add to your template’s <head> element):

<meta property=”og:image” content=“http://ia.media-imdb.com/rock.jpg”/>

If there is no “campaign-icon” element specified for a given campaign, Facebook will pick which image to use as a thumbnail.

]]> http://blog.mailchimp.com/coding-html-emails-for-facebook/feed/ 26 7 Basic Email Templates Every Business Needshttp://blog.mailchimp.com/7-basic-email-templates-every-business-needs/ http://blog.mailchimp.com/7-basic-email-templates-every-business-needs/#comments Wed, 30 Jan 2008 18:14:45 +0000 Ben http://blog.mailchimp.com/7-basic-email-templates-every-business-needs/ Getting started in email marketing? Here are 7 email templates every business will eventually need (this is basically a list of templates I’ve had to create for our own company over the years). You might as well go ahead and get these email templates built, so that they’ll be ready when you need them…

  • Your Monthly (or Quarterly) Newsletter Template: This one goes out to the general public who opted-in for your company news. You’ll probably want it to be a 2-column layout, so you can put self-gratuitous promotions in the side column. Be sure to keep the “main” column full of useful content.
  • Company Letterhead Template: Use this for rare announcements, such as pricing changes, shipping problems, billing errors, or “system is temporarily down” alerts. But read this before you send any public apologies with it.
  • Special Promotions Template: Use this when you have big, splashy product photographs to promote a big sale. We recommend MailChimp’s “postcard” email template.
  • Holiday E-card Template: This can be a variation of the postcard template. You’d insert a nice, beautiful graphic into the postcard image slot. Here are some free templates for your holiday e-cards.
  • Event (e-vite) Template: Use this when you want to invite people to a company event.
  • Event followup/Survey Template: Use this after your event has taken place, and you want to thank your attendees for coming. You might include a link to an online feedback survey (we recommend SurveyMonkey) and you might include digital photos from the event.
  • Internal Newsletter Template: Use this for sending internal newsletters to your staff.

If you’re a MailChimp customer, just use our built-in HTML email template designer to go ahead and create these templates now. Save them in your templates gallery, so that when the time comes (trust me, it will), you can just pick the template, add content, and click send. Our free email templates have been tested to work in all the major email programs, and they can be customized to look like a big expensive agency designed them for you (see some examples).

If you’re not a MailChimp customer, you can customize the free HTML email template code we provide here.

If you prefer to design your own HTML email templates, here are some coding tips and tricks from MailChimp’s Email Marketing Resource Library. Just be sure to test your email designs in all the major email programs before sending.

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